Beyoncé sang about women in power. And Barack Obama has been preaching it.
The 44th president of the United States indirectly corroborated Queen Bey’s claims in her monster hit song “Girls Run the World” when he said women are better in leadership positions.
More than that, however, Ivy League and elite college research substantiate Obama’s claims.
“If you look at the world and look at the problems, it’s usually old people, usually old men, not getting out of the way,” Obama said on Monday, Dec. 16, during a private speech in Singapore about leadership, according to the BBC News. “They cling to power, they are insecure, they have outdated ideas and the energy and fresh vision and new approaches are squashed.
“I’m absolutely confident that, for two years, if every nation on earth was run by women, you would see significant improvement across the board on just about everything — living standards and outcomes.”
Research conducted by the University of Illinois and Columbia University seems to back up Obama’s claims.
“Female leaders were significantly more likely than male leaders to have fast-growing economies,” Susan E. Perkins of the University of Illinois at Chicago Liautaud Graduate School of Business and Katherine W. Phillips of Columbia Business School wrote in February in the Harvard Business Review.
Specifically, the study said this:
- Countries led by women had an average of 5.4 percent gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the subsequent year;
- Compare this to those led by men, which had an average of 1.1 percent GDP growth, according to Perkins and Phillips.
“The important takeaway here,” wrote Perkins and Phillips, “is that female leaders are associated with economic outcomes that suggest that they may be better able to unlock the benefits of diversity at the country level than their male counterparts.”
